Pages

The two kids on the railway platform were
almost certainly brothers, and the lady, sitting on the painted bench watching
them fence with stick swords, was almost certainly their mother.There was a certain swashbuckling joy to the
swipes and thrusts of their swords that would sometimes find their mark, but
mostly just cut through thin air.One of
the brothers, the younger one if size is a marker of age, took a couple of neat
sideways steps, over the yellow markers, to avoid the artful thrust of his
brother.

The mother, suddenly animated, jumped to
her feet and said:“Stay away from the
edge. It’s dangerous”.The boy, as if
pursued by demons, fled from the danger and found sanctuary waiting just a few
meters away.

Edges are bad.If you stray over them you die.

-

On the radio, the commentator was whipping
himself into a kind of frenzy, as a team that the pundits had said would win
were ground down and beaten, by an unfancied, but youthful opposition.He summed up the situation thus:

“They don’t have that edge anymore, they
just don’t have that passion!

They’ve lost it, and they’re going to keep
losing until they get it back.”

Having an edge is good.Without one you are destined to be an also
ran, a seat warmer.

-

Most of the trees had lost their leaves in
the storms of the last few weeks.Piles
of paper brown leaves lined the edges of the pavements.Only the true Australian trees – gums –
retained their foliage, ever blue-greens.In the underpass water trickled down the walls, dark lines on pale
paint.There was a smell of cigarette
smoke, but no sign of the smoker – an old smell, a familiar smell; student
bars, walking up behind my father as he fished and passed the time with another
cigarette.

The platform on the station warns me about the
gap, but they really mean the edge.Morning dulled workers and a few school age passengers generally respect
the prohibition on edge walking, but a few risk takers stand way too close as
the train arrives.I’m surprised that
they are not arrested, or at least warned by the watchful eye of the CCTV
police in the control room somewhere distant and warm.The train doors open with a hiss and let us
pass into the safety of the carriage, leaving the yellow spotted edge
behind.

Beyond the edge of the tracks, out past the
broken stones and rusting signal works, a line of nature has found a
roothold.A narrow strip of trees and
brambles, garden escapees and natives; blending to make something new,
something different.These line edges
hold birds that would otherwise have been driven away from the sweeps of inch
perfect lawns and slug free vegetable patches.These strips, with one edge facing the train and one edge facing the
flanking houses, are the new wilds of suburbia.They represent ecological possibility in a realm of manicured
certainty.On this day, just after eight
in the morning, a trio of Black Cockatoos rise from the trees as the train
passes, yellow tails bright in the morning light.Their wings seem longer than their bodies, so
that they look offset, uneven; but they also seem to float with wing beats too
slow to hold such a large bird aloft. They are without question wonderful.No matter how good a day I have in the office
(and how good can it really be?), the day may have already peaked in the vision
of these birds.This morning the rail
edge dwellers make the trip worthwhile, breaking the solid edges of suburbia
with a hint of the wild and the possible.I move to the backward facing seats so that I can keep watching the
birds as they move away from me – temporal and spatial.If I had not moved seats the birds would have
quickly moved over the edge of my observation and I would have lost them.A small move makes the connection last
longer.A small move makes the day
better.A small move extends the edge of
my experience.

At work I sit in a workspace with a window,
a rare luxury in an office space that seems not to favour the distraction of
the real world.Trains come and go.People walk past.I may be distracted but I am connected, out
over the windowsill to the weather and the clouds.Sometimes I can hear the whisper of
conversation leaking from the never-private workspaces.Things that are not suitable for public
consumption; gossip or maybe discontent.The edges of such spaces are permeable, care needs to be taken so that
the things that were best kept private do not pass into the public.Mind the gap.

-

The view from the widescreen windows flows
down over paddocks, crisped to brown by warm weather and a lack of rain, towards
the sea.A few stumpy trees, twisted and
old, hang on in folds where a little moisture may linger when all else is
dry.This truly is an edge land – where
land meets sea, where European faming assumptions butt up against the reality
of a land unlike anywhere else on Earth and where now, the urban edges out the
rural.

Curlewis is a small, essentially anonymous,
little part of Victoria.As a child, my
wife knew it as a farming area, where dairy farmers kept cows on sparse
grasslands that had never before felt the heavy feet of cattle.Today the cows have gone, replaced by
boutique vineyards, and many of the paddocks are studded with identikit houses,
or the marker flags that plot their progress.There are empty streets, strangely lined with streetlights that contain
not a single house.They feel like a
zone of transition between the rural and the urban, and seem to contain the
least attractive elements of both places; broken fences and weed lines,
abandoned building supplies slowly falling back into the Earth from where they
came.There seems to be neither life nor
community.

This is the place where the unintended
edges of government policy clash with each other and fail to form a whole;
edges remain distinct and gaps arise.I
see houses but no schools, I see a supermarket but little else and I see houses
with garages, but streets without bus stops, as if the assumption of car
ownership is both a given and a long term option.In a small gap between two housing blocks
three ute loads of workers are taking down some form of agricultural holding
pen. Maybe it was intended for sheep, maybe cattle.But it’s clear that it is not intended for
suburbia.And later in the week when it
is gone, almost all signs of farming have been removed from a place that was
probably sold on the basis of advertisements rich with rural with images.A small flock of magpies – maybe six –
gather on a newly made driveway and only fly off at the approach of a small,
but enthusiastic dog.Around the corner,
a few rabbits nibble the grass down to the level of the soil, and there are
signs asking you to drive slowly because of the dust.

I feel a terrible sense of snobbery, but I
would not want to live there.But that
is a feeling made from a position that I never imagined I would have, based on
the fact that I have (remarkably) moved away from the edge of poverty to one of
(greater) security.What would it be
like to still in a position where heating and hot water are not assured, the
origin of the next meal uncertain, and where rainy nights were passed to the
sound of water dripping on the ceiling above my bed?How would I feel about these edge lands
then?What would these smart little
houses look like to me then? What dreams would I dream in houses surrounded by these
dust dry paddocks and haunted by the ghosts of agriculture lost?